Science as Conceptual Art

I think it was Tom Wolfe who said that with conceptual art, you don’t need to actually see the art object, it’s enough to know that someone made it. In other words, you don’t need to actually see the urinal that Marcel Duchamp signed or watch Chris Burden get shot in the arm, the important thing is that you know that somone did this thing and called it art and what repercussions that has for your own ideas about art.

Sometimes I read the titles of scientific papers, and I get a similar feeling. I don’t need to have been there to witness the research, I don’t even need to know about the results, it’s enough just to know that someone followed the quirks of their curiosity and then wrote a paper about it.

For instance: Bats and their ectoparasites: A first molecular phylogeny of batflies (Diptera).